The First Tesla Model S in Iran and Central Asia

Charging in Kurgan, Russia

Border Kazakhstan – Russia

The border between Kazakhstan and Russia would be our second last “real border”. Since both countries are befriended, we thought the border process should be easy. Leaving Kazakhstan was easy indeed. Entering Russia was little nerve-racking though. At the passport control, I went first and the border control discovered my visa from Iran and started questioning me, what I did there and so on (Benedikt thinks that they are afraid of terrorists coming to Russia – even though, terrorists from Iran don’t really exist. Terrorist organizations usually follow Sunni-Islam and Iran follows Shia-Islam). They also wanted exactly to know I am doing in Russia and so on. We had to wait for them doing a “special investigation” for about 30 minutes. After that, we got the stamps in our passport anyways. Our car got searched for about 10 minutes. After that procedure, we were free to go… uff!

Getting insurance and SIM-card

On a small both on the side of the street about 30 minutes after the border, we found the places that sold car-insurance. We were obliged to buy one (and from Kazakhstan we knew that police like to control this). After at least an hour in one of the booths, we had our insurance and a SIM-card. We managed all of this without really speaking any word of Russian and the insurance guy not speaking anything word of any other language than Russian. If people are patient, it’s possible to communicate in any language though!

Hotel & charging in Kurgan

We felt like already being in Scandinavia, when we started to drive in Russia towards the city Kurgan. Small lakes, birch trees and a lot of unsettled land form the landscape of this part of Russia. It is beautiful!

The first hotel we approached in Kurgan offered us right away help with charging (this is a situation that hardly ever happens!). There were small fuse boxes on the parking lot opposite to the hotel. The hotel organized an electrician that helped setting up a connection (even though this help wouldn’t have been necessary – Benedikt did this by now so often). Unfortunately, the connection wasn’t very strong. We could only charge with 10 to 15 amperes.

The hotel took extremely well care of us. They set up red and white security tape around the parking lot, so no one would enter during night. They also “secured” our charging cable during night (well… we planned to charge during night. I left the hotel to go on a jog in the morning and was quite surprised when I saw that there wasn’t any cable at our car anymore. But, we managed to charge the rest that we needed during the rest of the morning). Even though, somethings weren’t exactly what we asked for, we felt extremely well taken care off in the hotel in Kurgan!